Savory - food inventory management

Inspiration

Food waste in America has grown by over 204% since 1960 and 50% since 1990. Today, 50% of all food produced in the United States is thrown away averaging around 60 million tons and $160 billion worth of produce annually. Average American throws $2200 of food each year. To put that in perspective, in the USA food waste represents 1.3% of the total GDP. Furthermore, food waste is responsible for 7% of the worlds greenhouse gas emissions. Sadly, it is not an exaggeration to say that food waste is one of the biggest problems facing mankind today.

What it does

Savory allows a user to snap a photo of their grocery receipt and the items related information is automatically updated to your application. Data is extracted from the image using Google cloud vision API which includes; name, expiry date, production date, and price.

How we built it

For an accessible, portable and reliable solution. We made the app on react native which gives us the cross-platform portability on both iOS and Android. To recognize text and extract we have used Google cloud vision which is as reliable as Google technologies. Lastly, our storage layer is implemented in Firebase which is a secure and reliable cloud platform.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we faced is passing an image from a react library to the Cloud Vision API for extraction. For the Google Cloud Vision API, there isn't documentation of which react library fits in better so we had to use several of them to actually find a suitable library that solves our problem.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Tackling one of the biggest challenges of food production

What we learned

We learned about the consequences of food waste and how everyone can help to stop this global problem. Also, we deep dived into React Native and Firebase.